Syntactic base positions for adjuncts? Psycholinguistic studies on frame and sentence adverbials (original) (raw)

Problems of adverbial placement in learner English and the British National Corpus.

A tricky problem for French learners of English is to know where to put adjuncts in re-lation to the verb, as can be seen in these examples 1 taken from undergraduate essays: NNS11 Another strategy would be to change ?completely the distribution network. NNS19 The Pronunciation Unit has ?as well an important diplomatic role. NNS23 That’s why the advertisers thought about putting ?in the centre a picture of a top model. The primary aim of this paper is to explore the constraints on adjuncts which lead us to interpret these examples as awkward or ungrammatical. A second aim of this pa- per is to explore whether adjuncts occur in free combination in sentences or occur as chunks, parts of longer lexical patterns, on the basis of their behaviour in a corpus of texts, i.e. the British National Corpus. In this paper I use ‘adjunct’ to refer to lexical and grammatical adverbs (such as completely, also) as well as prepositional phrases and other expressions which function as adverbials (e.g. as well, in the centre). The syntactic features of adjunct placement are well documented in the comprehen-sive grammars of English (Jacobson 1964, Quirk et al. 1985. Huddleston and Pullum 2002). Apart from the large number of studies in generative grammar, adjuncts are generally discussed in terms of their placement in the sentence according to such cri- teria as prosodic detachment and thematic structure (Moignet 1961, Nøjgaard 1968, Dulbecco 1999, Van Belle 2000, Carlson et al. 2001). Specific adverbs, such as the specifier only have also been widely studied, because they present problems of semantic scope (Ballert 1977, Risanen 1980, Viitanen 1992, Cairncross 1997, Clement 1998, Frosch 1997, Van Belle 2000). More recently, there have been a handful of studies on adjuncts from a phraseological point of view, for example van der Wouden (1997), who examines collocations of negative polarity, and Lysvåg (1999), who looks at the phraseology of famously, as in the expression to get on famously. As far as I know, there has been no comparative analysis of adjunct positions in English and French from a phraseological perspective, and there has been little or no analysis of adjuncts in terms of contrastive error analysis (Sylviane Granger, personal communication).

PP Extraposition and the Order of Adverbials in English

Linguistic Inquiry

In English, adverbials may intervene between the verb and a selected PP. We initially consider three analyses of this fact. The traditional account is that the PP shifts rightward across a right-adjoined adverbial (Stowell 1981). An alternative account is that the verb moves leftward across a left-adjoined adverbial (Pesetsky 1989, Johnson 1991). A third possibility is a hybrid account that assumes both extraposition and verb raising. We argue that the order of postverbal adverbials favors the extraposition analysis, provided this analysis is combined with the auxiliary hypothesis that certain adverbials can directly modify other adverbials (Rohrbacher 1994, Williams 2014). We then compare two instantiations of the extraposition analysis: the traditional account and an antisymmetric account that emulates PP-extraposition through a combination of PP-intraposition and roll-up movement. While close to being notational variants, these accounts can be teased apart using the very strict l...

Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses

Linguistics 43: 449-470, 2005

This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses. Using corpus data from spoken and written English, it is shown that the positioning of finite adverbial clauses vis-à-vis the main clause varies with their meaning or function: conditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, temporal clauses are common in both initial and final position, and causal clauses usually follow the main clause. The article argues that the positional patterns of adverbial clauses are motivated by competing functional and cognitive forces. Specifically, it is shown that final occurrence of adverbial clauses is motivated by processing, while initial occurrence results from semantic and discourse pragmatic forces that may override the processing motivation.

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2013

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park…. Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the 'Discourse Framing Hypothesis' according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan's Event Indexing Model.

Subject positions and the placement of adverbials

Subjects, Expletives, and the EPP, 2002

The position of adverbs relative to other elements has been a critical diagnostic in the analysis of phrase structure. Earlier generative work on adverbs, such as Jackendoff 1972 and Ernst 1984, allowed for some flexibility in adverb placement, but noted certain regularities. Work on other aspects of clausal structure, such as Emonds 1976 and Platzack 1983, exploited the regularities, taking adverbs to mark phrasal boundaries, and used them to demonstrate the movement of other elements across them.

Adverb placement – convergence of structure and licensing

2000 Theoretical Linguistics 26:95-134.

This contribution addresses the following issues: i) the structural identification of adverb positions (adjoined, embedded or in Spec-positions); ii) interface conditions for adverbs (syntax-semantic interface); iii) serialization patterns of adverbs (post-vs. pre-head order). First, it is argued that important empirical generalizations are missed if adverbials are assigned to spec-positions of functional heads. This paper defends the claim that non-selected adverbials are either adjoined or embedded, depending on the relation to the head of the containing phrase: They are adjoined if they precede the head of the containing phrase. They are embedded if they follow the head of the containing phrase. Second, the relative order of adverbials is characterized as an interface effect of the mapping of syntactic domains on type domains in the structure of the semantic representation. Third, the differences in the pre-and post-head serialization patterns of adverbials that apparently support an adjunction analysis are reconciled with an embedding analysis. Key words: adverb positions; cascading or layered structures; postverbal adjuncts - embedded, not adjoined.

Adverb position and information structure in processing English

Many languages permit considerable flexibility of word order. However, when a phrase appears in a non-canonical position, typically there are information-structure constraints on its discourse status. For example, in Finnish, canonical order is SVO. When listeners encounter an OV sentence-beginning, they immediately predict that the (post-verbal) subject will refer to some discourse-new entity (Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004). In a language like German, a phrase may be scrambled to a position earlier than its canonical position. But typically the scrambled phrase must be already given in discourse and the clause will receive narrow focus (the focus will not include the scrambled constituent, see Bader and Meng, 1999 for experimental evidence). In a language with scrambling, identifying the structural position of arguments may be difficult. However, when the sentence contains an adverb, the adverb may in effect identify a structural position allowing the position of the argument to be de...

The syntax and semantics of locating adverbials

Cette étude examine les propriétés des adverbiaux de localisation du français à plusieurs niveaux. La structure syntaxique de ces éléments est décrite de même que les interactions complexes entre position dans la phrase et contribution sémantique. En se focalisant sur la position d'adjoint du syntagme verbal, on montre que le contenu sémantique des marqueurs considérés est mieux saisi par une approche 'relationnelle' que par une approche 'référentielle'. Une sémantique compositionnelle des adverbiaux en position de VP-adjoints est finalement proposée.

Framing adverbials and their role in discourse cohesion from connexion to forward labelling

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2005

In this synthetic presentation, I will briefly mention general findings on the cohesive function of some preposed IP adjuncts and focus on the fact that these adverbials, which we call "framing adverbials", support forward-looking cohesive links that contrast with the wellknown backward-looking ties expressed by connectives and anaphora. I. PREPOSED ADVERBIALS AS TOPICS In a seminal paper on infinitive purpose clauses, Thompson (1985) shows that, at discourse level, "initial and final purpose clauses in English are doing radically different jobs" (p. 57). While the "role of the final purpose clause can be seen to be a much more local one" consisting in stating " the purpose for which the action named in the preceding clause is/was undertaken", initial purpose infinitive clauses contribute to the cohesion of discourse. This contribution results from the fact that:-they are topical (i.e. "anchored" in the preceding context)-they can include in their scope several following sentences, whereas "the scope of a final purpose clause is restricted to its immediately preceding main clause." (p 67) This observation (for a detailed presentation and discussion, cf. Charolles & Lamiroy 2002, Charolles 2003) has been extended to preposed if (Ford & Thompson 1986, Ramsay 1984), when clauses (Virtanen 1992), and spatio-temporal prepositional phrases (Hasselgard 2004) 1. Concerning the topical status of preposed adverbials, it is true that in French as in English and in other languages (Diessel 2001), they are frequently linked to a preceding discourse segment. For example, in (1), the prepositional phrase (PP) dans une acception élargie is clearly announced by the preceding sentence: (1) "Qu'est-ce que l'écriture? L'usage a consacré différentes acceptions du mot. Dans une acception élargie, s'agissant de littérature et d'autres expressions artistiques, il peut désigner la manière de conduire un récit ou un exposé, au croisement des notions de «style» et de «forme». Ainsi parlera-ton , de l'«écriture» de Jean-Luc Godard dans Pierrot le fou. (beginning of a paper entitled "Les spécificités de l'écriture", Pour la Science) Nevertheless, preposed adverbials are not always anchored in the preceding context. Contrary to connectives, they can appear in text initial position, as in (1) where the first two sentences could be removed. Moreover, in most cases, preposed adverbials can hardly be considered as sentences topics since the content of the sentences they introduce is not about the semantic aspect denoted by the adverbial. This can be seen in (1) where the topic of the sentence beginning by dans une acception élargie is not the usage referred to by the PP, but the subject 1 More generally, the relations between the positions of adverbials in their host sentences and their topical status have generated a lot of publications (cf., inter alia,

Adverbials in German: More on embedding and focus

Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2012

Adverbials are well-known to form a rather heterogeneous class in multiple respects. Here we examine their ability to bear focus and their ability to be embedded in subordinate sentences. For focusability, the distinction between informational focus and contrastive focus proves to play a role. We discern six main classes of adverbials, identified by their base position. As expected, not all classes (or subclasses) can bear (informational or contrastive) focus, and also not all (sub)classes can be embedded. Among those that can, it is still only a proper subset that may simultaneously be embedded and focused. A general finding is that the lower in the syntactic tree an adverbial is base-generated, the more likely it allows for focusing as well as for embedding. The distinction between proposition-internal and proposition-external adverbs is shown to be helpful in determining which adverbials may bear (informational) focus. Also certain extrinsic factors like the type of the embedding...